Myself, at home I have an external hard drive that I back stuff up to once in a while, then I hide it (in case of burglary). I use the built-in Windows 7 backup utility and also do a plain old file copy-&-paste, nothing too elaborate here. Anyway, that's my lifeline in case of hard-drive failure or theft.

Myself, at home I have an external hard drive that I back stuff up to once in a while, then I hide it (in case of burglary).

What if your house burns down?

I have an external hard drive for immediate back-up and access, but then I back-up everything else with Mozy. For huge files (video), I burn a data-DVD and leave it at my sister's house (30 miles away).

Good point, I should grab a high-capacity USB stick for at least the most critical stuff. Hard drives are going through a price spike right now due to the flooding in Thailand that put some HDD makers' factories in 4 feet of floodwater.

I also manage the backup strategy at work. It's quite robust for a small business, combining two types of on-site backup that are both capable of bare-metal recovery, plus weekly off-site backup of the server's OS and daily on/off-site backup of our point-of-sale database. Although if the building burns down, we're probably not going to need to do the recovery for a while

Home PC is setup with two hard drives in RAID 1. All the important files start out there. The folder the files are in then gets copied nightly to a NAS device I have with two hard drives in RAID 1.

I also have dropbox setup on my laptop, my wife's laptop, and the home PC. The dropbox folder on the home PC is included in the nightly copy to my NAS.

On the NAS, all the nightly backups are stored in nightly folders for the past 7 days. That way, if I backup a damaged file, I can go to a previous night's backup and pull the file. Only downside to this is the nightly backups aren't incremental, so the storage requirements can get quite large.

The big thing about the process is it is entirely automated. If it wasn't automated, I would never remember to back up. I get an e-mail if the backup fails for whatever reason.

I have never thought of storing the data on my NAS offsite some how. I guess it would suck if the house burned down... Hmm... I guess the dropbox stuff is also stored on "the cloud", but that isn't all of my data.

My photos are backed up on Picasa Web Albums. My most important documents are in Google Docs. Everything else is (was) duplicated across two laptops and occasionally copied to external drives. The old laptop died. I need a replacement.

External HD for 3 machines. Really only in case of PC hardware failure.

Dropbox can be OK if you have less then 2g of data.

For Windows machines I recently started using Microsoft's SyncToys, a free sync program that file sync's and backs up between a USB (or HD) and a PC HD. Right now I'm using a 16g USB and run SyncToy to get my key work files saved and available for home use.

Laptops and desktops at home dump a incremental snapshot nightly, and a full backup weekly. Full backups are kept for a month, but only the past weeks nightly incremental are kept.

My servers at the office also replicate to my house, and another off-site backup box at the company owners house. We're all on FIOS so the replication is quite fast and painless.

Nice! Well done.

I have an 8tb RAID5 array @home on the main PC. Currently depending on itself (see RAID5), which keeps me safe from a single hard drive failure but not against something more drastic as fire & flood, or more common as a thief.

I've been thinking about using some cloud storage, at least for the irreplaceable stuff like family photos and videos.